


Partners

by Drinktothemadness



Series: the 100 drabbles [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 4+1, Canon Compliant, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Future Fic, Post 2x14
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 21:50:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3463304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drinktothemadness/pseuds/Drinktothemadness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times that Bellamy brings Clarke a gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Partners

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't read ['I wish you hadn't'](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3334019), i would suggest reading it first :)

1\. Jasper & Monty

 

Bellamy brings her the first gift while she’s on duty in the medical bay. She sees him out of the corner of her eye, hovering in the doorway, but when she half-smiles at him he makes no move to enter the room. Instead he waits until she’s tended to all the patients and organised all the supplies and finally has a moment to herself to just _breathe_.

“Hey,” he says, coming to sit beside her on the bench in the corner. They never talked about that night - there's a new hesitancy between them though, both of them a little guarded like they have to constantly remind themselves that they are not two halves of a whole - that they are partners in leading their people and in nothing more. 

“Hey. Everything okay? Does someone need me?”

“No,” he says. 

She looks at him funny. “What are you doing in here, then? _You’re_ not hurt, are you?” 

He shakes his head, digs around in his jacket pocket until he finds a little parcel. It’s a dark leather pouch, tied with a drawstring. He hands it to her.

Clarke stares down at it. “What’s this?”

“It’s a gift,” Bellamy says. He pauses. “From Jasper and Monty.”

“Jasper?” She tugs on the strings and the pouch falls open. It’s inside is filled with a pile of small berries. They’re a deep burgundy-red. Clarke hasn’t seen anything like them in camp before.

“They’re not for eating,” Bellamy says. “I mean, Monty says they’re edible, but…he says some of the girls around camp use them like lipstick. If you crush them and use the juice to stain your lips? Jasper says it makes them feel pretty.”

Clarke looks at him again, and this time there is a little crease of a frown between her eyebrows. “Don’t really think I have the time to be messing around making myself feel pretty, Bell.”

“Right,” he says.

“Tell the boys thanks, though,” she says, popping one of the berries in her mouth. She chews thoughtfully, and then smiles. “Hey, they’re not bad. You want one?”

He picks one out of the pouch, and then another, and they sit there side by side on the bench eating berries in silence until they’re all gone. Bellamy wonders if Clarke can sense the tension in his body, how he has to keep all his muscles taught to stop himself from leaning into her, moving into her space. How terrified he is that she can hear how loud his heart is beating.

“I should get back to the guard,” he says eventually. Clarke doesn’t stop him. He pauses in the doorway again on his way out and turns back to face her. “You don’t need lipstick, by the way. You’re already beautiful.”

Clarke smiles again, this time wider and less reserved. She is absolutely radiant. Bellamy notes, as he walks away, how the juice from the berries have stained her lips anyway, and how well the deep red brings out the blue in her eyes.

2\. Abby

 

Clarke’s second gift comes in the form of a little tub of ugly green paste. She stares down at it in horror when Bellamy places it into her hands. 

“It’s from your mum,” he says. “She says it’ll help with your shoulders.”

The muscles across Clarke’s shoulder blades were tight and sore from their last foraging expedition, and she’d spent the last twenty-Four hours rubbing at them incessantly without even realising it. It had been driving Bellamy crazy, knowing that she was in pain and there was nothing he could do to help - that’s why he’d stopped by to see Abby, to see if she had any recommendations.

“Thanks,” Clarke said finally. “I guess.”

“It’s got Menthol in it, and also Camphor, which she says will reduce any swelling or inflammation of the muscles.”

Clarke turned the tub over slowly in her hands. “I know what Camphor does,” she said softly.

“Right,” Bellamy said, heading for her dorm door. “Well. I hope it helps.”

She stops him with a hand on his arm. “Wait. How am I supposed to apply it? I can’t reach.”

“Oh.”

“Could you…?”

“Sure,” he says. She hands him the tub and he eases of the lid, focuses his attention on the green paste and not on the fact that Clarke is peeling off her top and throwing it onto her bed in the corner. She positions herself in front of him, sweeping her blonde curls to the side and pulling down her bra straps so that her shoulders are uncovered. 

Bellamy takes a deep, steadying breath and dips his fingertips into the paste. He applies it as carefully as he can, rubbing it into her pale skin in small circles. Clarke begins to relax beneath his touch, her head lolling forward as she lets out little murmurs of appreciation.

“Oh god,” she says, voice breathy. “That feels so good.”

Bellamy’s face burns hotly. He works his fingers a little harder, really massaging into the tight knots in her muscles. Clarke leans into his touch, leans back like she wants more of him, all of him, and Bellamy cares about her so much that he suddenly can’t breathe.

He let’s his hands drop. “Better?”

“Better,” she agrees. He throws her over her top, and she pulls it on hastily, not worried by the fact that it will probably be covered in green smudges. Bellamy’s hands are tingling from the paste but his whole body is tingling from touching Clarke, from being so close to Clarke, from Clarke in general.

“They need me on Watch,” he said lamely.

She nods. “Tell her thank you for me, will you?”

“Thank you?”

“My mum? For the paste?”

“Right,” Bellamy says, and ducks out of the room.

 

3\. Raven

 

The third gift comes just as autumn forces its way into camp with its colder temperatures and its falling leaves and its rain. Bellamy stops in at the med bay again, as he’s taken to doing when he’s not needed somewhere else around camp. He’s holding a big bunch of bright, colourful flowers.

“Flowers?” Clarke says when she sees him, cocking an eyebrow.

“From Raven.”

“Raven send me flowers?”

Bellamy glances around at the dreary med bay. “She thought they might cheer this place up.”

Clarke smiles, taking them from him graciously. “She’s got a good brain, that one.”

She finds an empty container and arranges the flowers inside it, filling it up with water from one of the bottles from the supply table. The blooms are perfect, petals fully unfurled and stunning under the bright lighting. She wonders if they still glow in the dark even after they’d been picked. She hopes so.

Clarke turns back to Bellamy. He’s watching her, face contorted into an expression she can’t quite decipher. “They’re really beautiful. Raven has good taste in fauna.” 

He runs a hand through his curls. “Well, I…I helped her pick them out,” he says. “I remembered some of the ones you liked when we were on the last hunting trip.”

Clarke turns back to the flowers, her heart in her throat and her eyes suddenly swimming with tears. Goddamnit, why was he like this? She didn’t need any more reasons to love him.

“Thank her for me,” she says. "It means a lot that she would do this for me."

She doesn’t turn back towards him. He doesn’t say anything for a while. Neither of them say anything for while.  “Will do,” he says finally, heavily, and walks out of the room.

 

4\. Octavia

 

They’ve been on the ground a year. They’ve survived a year and they’re still alive and they’re still together (for the most part) and Clarke should be happy but she’s not. She’s sat by the edge of the campfire on her own while everyone else dances and sings and drinks and plays games and celebrates the fact that they _made it_. 

Bellamy comes and sits beside her. He hands her over a bottle full of moonshine. “From Octavia,” he says. “She says you need to loosen up.”

She takes a couple of gulps of the sharp drink, swallowing it down until she feels herself begin to relax a little, her tummy warm. Bellamy takes a swig too, and they alternate for a while, one swig each until half the bottle has gone and they’ve somehow melted into one another. Maybe it’s the moonshine or maybe it’s the heat of the fire or maybe it’s just the fact that Bellamy is warm and solid beside her and for once he’s not worrying about making sure there’s a suitable amount of distance between them, an appropriate amount, the right amount. (The wrong amount.)

Bellamy snakes an arm around her shoulders and pulls her closer until she’s flush against him. She closes her eyes and leans into his space, breathes in his smell. Her whole head swims with it, with him, with how she feels about him. _I wish you hadn’t_ , he’d said to her all those months ago. She’d thought that would change something, that he was saying something more, but here they were after all this time and everything was exactly the same.

“You were supposed to love me,” she says into his shoulder. 

Bellamy stills, freezes. “What?”

“You were supposed to love me,” she repeats. “After that you said about Finn and I. After what I said about you and Raven. You were supposed to realise that you were in love with me, that you’d always been in love with me.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “Would it have changed anything?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“No,” she says. “We’d never work.”

“Why not?”

“There’s too much at risk,” she says. “Too much to fuck up. I can’t lose you.”

“What makes you think you’d lose me?”

She snorts softly into his neck. “Like I’d be able to keep you, Bellamy fucking Blake.”

“Clarke,” he says, voice strained. She raises her head to look at him. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know I’ve been completely in love with you for at least half the time we’ve been on this goddamn planet.”

She stares at him. Her blue eyes are wide and she is so, so beautiful. He loves her. He’s in love with her. 

“Don’t give me false hope,” she says, voice quiet, shaking, scared.

“I’m not,” he says. “I know you feel it too, Princess. Just like I know that you know we can do this.”

“We can’t,” she says weakly. “We’re partners in ruling, thats all. In war.”

“But I’m sick of war,” he says. “Aren’t you? I’m tired of all this fighting. Just like I’m tired of pretending that this isn’t what I want. I don’t want to just be your partner in ruling, Clarke, I want to be your partner in life! Your partner in love. Your partner in…in fucking _everything_ , Clarke. I want to be your partner in everything. Okay? We won’t fuck this up. I won’t let us. So can we at least let ourselves try?”

She answers him by surging upwards to kiss him, lips soft against his. He is surprisingly gentle, surprisingly tender for all the fire in his words, holding her like he’s scared she might break. Clarke doesn’t mind. They have all the time in world.

Jasper and Monty and Abby and Raven and Octavia watch them from across the campfire as they share their first kiss.

“Fucking _finally_ ,” Octavia says, and everybody murmurs their agreement.

 

5\. Bellamy 

 

There are lots of gifts after that. Lots of flowers, lots of back rubs and medicine, lots of sweet berries and shared moonshine. Art supplies, record players, vintage dresses, books, paintings, all traded from the Grounders in return for technology and knowledge. Bellamy brings her gifts to mark their one week anniversary as official partners in everything, their one month anniversary, their one year. Clarke just shoves him in the chest and tells him to stop and kisses him until they’re both dizzy with it, but she doesn’t mind, not really. Not now he’s stopped pretending they’re not for him.

Clarke’s favourite gift comes on their four year anniversary. They’ve been on the ground for five years, for half a decade, and Clarke loves Bellamy more and more with every day that passes. He gives her the gift in a dark leather pouch like the one he brought her the lipstick berries in.

It’s not more berries, though. It’s a beautiful antique ring.

(She says yes, obviously.)


End file.
